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Everyone Does The Work
On Gatekeeping Effort Among Educators
For the first time in six years, I’m teaching for my full FTE this year. Due to various institutional shifts in job descriptions, and stepping out of my role as an instructional coach, I have five sections (two preps). Which is awesome. I’m enjoying myself tremendously.
This transition has also occasioned three (so far) conversations with colleagues wherein they either ask me if I’m “ready” to go back to teaching full-time (“how are you holding up?”), or note that another colleague had mentioned to them that they expected I’d be much less energetic now that I’m back to giving more of my workday efforts over to teaching. In other words, the thinking goes, teaching is more work than whatever it is that an educator might be released for.
I can understand where this thinking comes from, but I strongly disagree with the sentiment. In a school, no job is harder than any other.
I’m not going to take the opposite position and suggest that teaching is easier than coaching, or running a department. But I’m not going to say it’s harder, either. It’s different, and that’s about as far as I’m comfortable going.
The kinds of things that an educator does when not teaching are highly variable. And yet, in 21 years of this work, I have never met a teacher…
